On Sept. 29 I went down with a few people to an antiwar demonstration in Washington, D.C. sponsored by the Troops Out Now Coalition (TO NC). Though I talked with a lot of people and had a good time, it also clarified a lot of my concerns about the direction of the antiwar movement.

The demonstration garnered considerably fewer participants than past marches, with at best 5,000 people in attendance. Yet the conversations I shared with several other activists centered not around the numbers, but more about what we were there to do.

Looking around, this question was accentuated by the some of the odd characters around us. A guy who resembled “Comic Book Guy” from The Simpsons kept droning on about Hubert Humphrey in ‘76. Another man with a permanent helmet and air traffic controller headset looked like he was evading a group home. There was a talkative fellow with a serious facial rash who was enthusiastic about a possible Sam Nunn presidential bid. And then there was the same Trot guy I always see, young, but getting a little older now, still hawking his papers and arguing his correct line.

On the Troops Out Now bus from New York, we were told how important the day was, but the speakers at the rally outside the Capital repeated the same old things while we called out the same old chants and got back the same old responses. Souvenir guys hawked protest t-shirts (dated Sept. 29!) just like at a serious basketball game or Disney World. Other than an extended detour on a lost bus, it was a protest like any other: speeches no one listened to, marching and chanting for two hours and requests for money.

On the bus back, a nice, well-intentioned bus captain talked about a new kind of movement. But, she passed out the same weathered copy of some paper that I always see and which I put down after reading only a few sentences of another re-tread article. There have been upwards of 20 “major” demonstrations in D.C. and countless other ones around the world, involving millions of people. What have we produced? A million dead in Iraq, years of war and a very real concern that the United States will attack Iran.

Speakers on a stage and marching in circles is not working and hasn’t been for some time. It is difficult to live in this time and place, but we have to get past these self-therapeutic rituals of illusory resistance. We say, “No Justice, No Peace,” and nobody asks what that really means. We have had no justice. Does “no peace” really mean shouting loudly on empty Saturday streets?

As I looked around the tired faces on the bus coming back, something crystallized. The 30 percent of the country who still likes Bush will like him no matter what: because he’s white, because they’re afraid, because they think bombing Iran will somehow keep everything holding on for that much longer. And these people will never stray.

They’re the ones at the pre-screened rallies, thanking him for all he’s doing. They’re politically like Terri Schiavo: there, but not. I’m a lefty and will be until I die. I think we can have a world of justice and freedom and that capitalism and its various sicknesses, man-made as they are, can be unwrought and a better society can be formed. I don’t think there is a liberal solution: we couldn’t reform our way out of the concentration camps and we can’t lobby our way past the death squads.

But, looking around the bus, I felt too much of a connection between Bush’s 30 percent, following blindly, and this antiwar moment, performing our anger, but resisting nothing. We owe it to ourselves to create a new strategy. Because this isn’t working.

Ten CR strategy and struggle to abolish the prison industrial complex: ten years and counting.

Comments

Agree Completely

10/18/2007 - 4:07pm

Americans are too consumed by entertainment and comfort to demand change. We think that this is good living. Why should we give up our minivans and HD TV's and Monday Night Football and once-a-week cooking lessons? The problem is that although millions of Americans disagree with our increasingly dictatorial government, they won't rock the boat. They're not willing to take the huge and irreversible step from protest to action. I don't know if I am.

There's a lot to give up and it's difficult to do on your own. When will the American condition be bad enough to inspire radical change?

I really appreciate this article and its honesty. In my experience, these large demonstrations have been most valuable for the simple experience that I have at them, and they have rarely given me a sense that as a "movement" this "action" was going to change the world directly.
It doesn't suprise me that people go to D.C. to protest the war; I almost felt like going myself. It also doesn't suprise me that once there, people ask "just what are we doing here"? Our society doesn't change in response to marches; its a reality that is difficult to come to sometimes---espeically during a march that one may have energy invested in and expectations of.
But, as this writer exhibits, PEOPLE change in marches. For me, marching along the streets of Quebec City pre-911was a huge wake-up call. We didn't put much of a dent in the meetings that were going on, but my experience there serves me powerfully to this day. And I feel the same about many demos since.
My guess is that for every one of you at D.C. that day, there were a thousand of us here in our towns, going about our work to bridle capitalism and end war. Very few demonstrations actually represent the essence of the movement they purport to give voice to. Many folk gave up on the mass demo thing and are in their little towns, doing the little changes that will, with time, bring us back together again on a regional/national/global scale, and the "movement" will actually move. Cheers on the honest observations, and keep on!